Tag Archives: First Nations

The Canadian state brutally violated the Rights of Unist’ot’en and Gidimt’en clans of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, in the interests of the Oil and Gas Barons. Demonstrations immediately occurred in over 30 cities as thousands of Canadians showed they are fed up with Official Racism.

The RCMP moved to enforce a B.C. Supreme Court injunction to allow pipeline workers to pass through two Wet’suwet’en checkpoints on January 9. A heavily armed SWAT team attacked peaceful indigenous protesters and violently arrested 14 land defenders. Over the next two days, virtually spontaneous demonstrations occurred in dozens of towns and cities in reaction to repeated state violence against indigenous people and against the pollution that emanates from the global corporate profit machine. Mass media was excluded by the cops from the site of the attack, but photos taken by indigenous bystanders show protesters being cruelly attacked by multiple police, pushing their faces into the snow.

The permanent Unist’ot’en camp, and the more recently established Gidimt’en checkpoint, are part of an ongoing effort by Wet’suwet’en hereditary leaders and members to protect unceded lands from pipeline construction. “The proposed pipelines are a threat to the watershed, as well as to the plants, animals and communities that depend on them,” the Unist’ot’en Camp states on its website.

While more than one proposed pipeline would cross through Wet’suwet’en traditional territory, Trans Canada’s Coastal GasLink project is at the centre of the current injunction dispute.

The proposed Coastal GasLink pipeline would span 670 kilometres across northern British Columbia. It is intended to supply natural gas from near Dawson Creek, B.C. to the planned LNG Canada export facility near Kitimat, B.C., where it would be converted to liquefied natural gas for export. Construction is estimated to cost about $4.8 billion.

According to LNG Canada, Coastal GasLink would be the only pipeline to supply its facility in Kitimat, B.C. on the Pacific coast. A company spokesperson called it an “essential component of the LNG Canada project.” This $40 billion project to be built by a global consortium will subject the entire area to heavy gas fracking operations. Preliminary fracking was recently halted in the wake of earthquakes. Moreover, the project makes it impossible for B.C. to meet its carbon reduction goals.

Jody Wilson-Raybould, recently demoted by Prime Minister Trudeau from Justice Minister to Veterans’ Affairs Minister, issued a 1,100 word tract on her demotion. Citing the PM’s own words, that the relationship between Canada and Indigenous people is the “most important” one, she reminds all that “the work that must be done is well known,” and “legislative and policy changes based on the recognition of title and rights, including historic treaties, are urgently needed.” Toward the end of her letter she pledges to “continue to be directly engaged” in advancing “fundamental shifts.”

Wilson-Raybould is a woman of Kwakwaka’wakw heritage who was previously the Regional Chief of the BC Assembly of First Nations. And her words were being written the week after a heavily-armed RCMP contingent used force to remove Wet’suwet’en activists from a ‘checkpoint’ on the road to a work camp for gas-line workers. The line crosses lands where, courts have ruled, hereditary chiefs hold historic and traditional title. Those chiefs, it seems, were not part of the ‘consultation and accommodations’ promised for the project.

The elected band council is a creation of the colonial settler federal government-imposed Indian Act of 1876 which treated indigenous people as wards of the state, essentially as children. In an attempt to destroy the traditional basis of indigenous government, the Act created elected Band Councils which, the government assumed, could be more easily swayed than traditional hereditary chiefs. Turns out that was true in this case. The band council came to terms with the Trans Canada Pipeline. But the hereditary Chiefs were not included and do oppose the pipeline. The clans for the most part are following the hereditary chiefs.

The big question remains: By what right is Trans Canada Pipeline able to get a court injunction to allow their workers onto un-ceded indigenous land in the first place? By what conceivable logic can the RCMP, claiming to be “neutral” and merely “enforcing the law”, send heavily armed SWAT team members onto Indigenous land and brutally attack a peaceful road blockade, arresting 14 native land defenders in the process. The cops are far from neutral. They are imposing the will of settler capitalism on the indigenous people. They are enforcing the laws of the white man to seize indigenous land and using it to generate white profits.

The settler government has consistently violated indigenous sovereignty and the right to self determination in the interests of white capitalist profit and racist social policy. The Canadian federal government, for decades, organized the forced removal of indigenous children to brutal Residential Schools. In those schools, many were physically, sexually and psychologically abused, over-worked, under-fed and punished for speaking their own language. Many children died.

In 2010, Ottawa endorsed the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The latest Trudeau/RCMP action violates the declaration dramatically. The racist policy and practice has to cease. Trans Canada Pipeline should get off indigenous land. Protesters should be released and RCMP excluded from indigenous land. No to the pipeline. No to the LNG Canada fracking operation. Self-determination for indigenous people.

Cultural genocide is an explosive term – but not too strong when applied to the fate of many languages of Indigenous people across North America, Turtle Island.

According to 2016 Canadian census data, the mother tongue of over 213,000 people was an Indigenous language. In Ontario, it was over 25,000.

In September, parents of Indigenous children enrolled at the Toronto District School Board petitioned trustees to expand the Indigenous language programme. Board officials acknowledged the need for more. Seven schools have provided Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) classes for over a decade. But of the 53 languages taught to 30,000 students during the International Language Elementary Programme last year, none were Indigenous.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s call to action highlights the need to preserve and strengthen Indigenous language and culture. Clearly, there is far to go.

Gisele Gordon, one of the TDSB-petitioning parents, told the Toronto Star “My mother-in-law is a fluent Cree speaker. My husband, like most of his generation, is not. This is a direct result of residential schools.”

On October 5, the Canadian federal government agreed to pay $800 million to survivors of the “60s Scoop” for the harm suffered by an estimated 20,000 Indigenous children who were robbed of their cultural identities when seized by the state and placed with non-native families between 1965 and 1984. There is no “settlement” on the table for the victims of the infamous Residential Schools programme, which placed more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children in church-run schools from the 1870s to 1996. Many of those children were beaten, sexually abused, and starved for speaking their mother tongues.

Meanwhile, in the secret talks to re-write the North America Free Trade Agreement, the Canadian government’s promise to “modernize” the NAFTA by demanding it include a new chapter on Indigenous peoples, seems to be empty. It is reminiscent of the Jay Treaty of 1794, signed by Britain and the USA, which pledged free cross-border movement of Indigenous people and the goods traded by them, along with protection for Indigenous cultural properties and traditional knowledge.

Can there be “reconciliation” before there is real, substantial restitution, to the tune of trillions of dollars, from the treasury of the corporations and business elites who have profited from Indigenous genocide and the plunder of natural resources?

A review of “The Inconvenient Indian – A Curious Account of Native People in North America” by Thomas King, published by Anchor Canada, a division of Random House, 2013, 314 pages.

Thomas King, best known as the creator and star of the hilarious CBC Radio One series “The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour”, is the author of a funny book about the sad tragedy that is the situation of North American indigenous peoples. The book is a best-seller, proving again that a serious message can reach a huge readership through the medium of satire, without debasing the cause.

Born in Sacramento, California, Thomas King is of Cherokee, Greek and German-American descent. As an adult, he migrated to Australia, where he worked for years as a photojournalist. After moving to Canada in 1980, King taught Native Studies at the University of Lethbridge in the early 1980s. He also served as a faculty member of the University of Minnesota’s American Indian Studies Department. King is currently an English professor at the University of Guelph, about an hour west of Toronto. King was the NDP candidate for Guelph in the October 14, 2008 federal election, finishing fourth behind the Liberal, Conservative, and Green Party candidates.

“The Inconvenient Indian” is a short, post-modern version of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” King recounts the massacres inflicted by the European colonial powers, records many of the lies, broken land treaties, the physical displacement, and the cultural genocide that still masquerades as education. The author postures as the skeptic, and proceeds to eviscerate the skepticism that surrounds corporate media coverage of aboriginal issues.

Why does he use the antiquated word ‘Indian’ when First Nations is the term of choice in Canada, and Native Americans is preferred in the United States? King calls it “the North American default”. Then he amusingly disparages his decision to name the non-native population ‘Whites.’ “Well, I struggled with this one. A Japanese friend of mine likes to call Anglos ‘crazy Caucasoids,’ while another friend told me that if I was going to use the term ‘Indians’ I should call everyone else ‘cowboys.’”

King identifies three kinds of Indian: Dead Indians, Live Indians and Legal Indians. Dead are the ones that “are the stereotypes and cliches that North America has conjured up out of experience and out of its collective imaginings and fears.” Society sees “war bonnets, beaded shirts, fringed deerskin dresses, headbands.” “You can find Dead Indians everywhere. Rodeos, powwows, movies, television commercials.” They pose no threat to power.

Live Indians, on the other hand, were an “annoying part of life in the New World.” European diseases killed about 80 per cent of them. The American newspaper mogul Horace Greeley said in 1859, “The Indians are children… the very lowest and rudest of human existence… These people must die out – there is no help for them.” King sarcastically adds: “Problem was, Live Indians didn’t die out.”

The Canadian census of 2006 records the existence of 565,000 Status Indians. The total indigenous population in Canada then, including Indians, Metis and Inuit, was 1.2 million – not counting those living on at least 22 Indian reserves, overlooked according to Statistics Canada. In the United States, federal “recognition” is granted to tribes rather than individuals. In 2009 the U.S. Federal Register recognized 564 tribes, encompassing about 950,000 people. The total number of Indians in the U.S. is around 2.4 million, or a few hundred thousand more or less, given the vagaries of the census.

Legal Indians have certain rights and privileges – because of the treaties both countries signed with Native nations. About 40 per cent of Live Indians in North America are Legal Indians. King caustically observes that “while North America loves the Dead Indian and ignores the Live Indian, North America hates the Legal Indian. Savagely.” He acerbically describes the treaties as an error in judgement that the establishment has been trying to correct for the last 150 years.

Legal Indians are ‘inconvenient’. That’s because their legal rights stand in the way of Private Profit – er, I mean Progress. (Sorry, I’m starting to sound like the author.)
But why can’t indigenous people just melt into the population at large? Sure, they’ve been robbed, kidnapped, displaced, and much worse than decimated. But why can’t they just say let’s ‘let bye-gones be by-gones’, and just ‘get over it?’

Well, should Jews, gays and Roma people just ‘get over’ the Nazi holocaust? Ought Blacks just ‘get over’ the murderous Middle Passage and nearly three hundred years of slavery? Doesn’t the commitment to the idea of ‘Never again’ require an historical memory?

How about the question of Aboriginal self-reliance?

King writes: “I’ve been told any number of times that we have to learn to stand on our own two feet and develop the skills necessary to manage on our own, without relying on government generosities.

“In the same way that Air Canada, AIG, Bombardier, Halliburton, General Motors, and the good folks out in Alberta’s Tar Sand Project manage on their own, without relying on government handouts.

“I suppose I could have mentioned Enron, World Com, Bre-X, and Bear Stearns as well, but these disasters were more greed than incompetence. Weren’t they? Though I suppose the one does not preclude the other.

“So, if I’ve got it right, while North America is reluctant to support the economic “incompetence” of Native people, it is more than willing to throw money at the incompetence of corporations. And why not? After all, if we’ve learned nothing in the last century, we should have learned that government support of big business is capitalism’s only hope.”

That’s a surprisingly radical analysis for a one-time NDP candidate, even if it is not accompanied by a concrete programme for radical change.

Here’s another way to look at the self-reliance idea, as it’s posed under capitalism. Some workers belong to a union. That gives them strength lacked by workers who don’t. Some indigenous people have treaty rights, which gives them a toe-hold, and a bit of leverage on the capitalist state. In the absence of a cooperative commonwealth for all, does it make sense to give up the little they’ve got, however ‘inconvenient’ they may be to big business?

To be sure, “The issue has always been land” insists King. “It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people.” It’s a sensitive issue, as discovered by 13-year-old Tenelle Starr from the Star Blanket First Nation, 90 kilometres north-east of Regina, Saskatchewan. She was sent home from school in early January because she was wearing a pink hoodie bearing the slogan ‘Got Land? Thank an Indian’. The good news is that now Tenelle’s friends are sporting the slogan, and the social media is all a-buzz.

In the meantime, indigenous land titles continue to stand in the way of corporate resource extraction, even of military training bases (like the one at Stoney Point Ojibway reserve in Ontario where provincial police shot and killed native protester Dudley George in 1995).

Fortunately, indigenous peoples’ opposition to pipeline construction has helped to forge an alliance of farmers, workers and environmentalists concerned about pollution and climate change. This convergence is reflected in the broad public support for the Idle No More movement that arose in late 2012.

The path that capitalists and their governments have taken to remove the native land obstacle to profit maximization is called ‘termination’. If the policy sounds deadly, it’s no accident.

Neither is it anything new. After centuries of dispossession and genocide, ‘modern’ governments stepped up to the plate. Duncan Campbell Scott, head of Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs from 1913-1932 put it bluntly: “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department…”

In 1953, the U.S. Congress passed the Termination Act and the Relocation Act concurrently. It allowed Congress to terminate all federal relations with tribes unilaterally, while Relocation “encouraged” Native people to quit their reservations and move to the cities.

In 1969, the Canadian government tried to do the same thing with its White Paper. Then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau suggested that there is no such thing as Indian entitlement to land or Native rights, and urged First Nations people to assimilate into Canadian society. The reaction was massively and fiercely negative. What do you suppose would happen if Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau advocated that today?

While the Conservative government of Stephen Harper drags its feet, Tory ideologue Tom Flanagan openly campaigns for the termination of Native status, and for dispersal and privatization of aboriginal lands.

The interest of the working class lies in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. The reasons are clear. One is the practical need for unity between workers and all oppressed peoples against the bosses and their state. Another is based on recognition that the struggle of Indigenous people to preserve their collective land rights constitutes a powerful obstacle to the agenda of Capital – which is to turn all of nature into a commodity, for sale to the highest bidder, subject to ruthless despoliation.

Thomas King’s “The Inconvenient Indian – A Curious Account of Native People in North America” is remarkably witty, often hilarious, and a truthful companion for the important battles ahead. Read it, and use it well.

The ‘Idle No More’ movement, a campaign for indigenous rights, democracy and environmental justice, spread like wildfire in December in response to Conservative federal government legislation.

An unprecedented wave of grassroots action is sweeping across First Nations communities. Over a hundred public rallies were organized locally, in particular by young people frustrated by the systemic inequality that persists across the country. There were gatherings in shopping malls, marches on major highways, blockades on railway tracks, and flash mobs occupying busy intersections in downtown Toronto and other cities. The movement is attracting support from around the world.

First Nations people also demonstrated on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, December 21, to protest Bill C-45, the Stephen Harper government omnibus budget bill which fuelled the growing movement. C-45 includes changes to the Indian Act affecting how reserve lands are managed, making them easier to ‘develop’, and to be taken away from the First Nations’ people.

The bill also removes thousands of lakes and streams from the list of federally protected bodies of water. “This is unacceptable. They have made a unilateral decision remove the protection of waterways… Shell Canada has proposed to mine out 21km of the Muskeg River, a river of cultural and biological significance. This ultimately gives the tar sands industry a green light to destroy vital waterways still used by our people,” stated Eriel Deranger, Communication Coordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.

Atiwapiskat First Nation Chief Theresa Spence who has been on a hunger strike since December 11, resolved to starve herself to death unless Prime Minister Stephen Harper meets to discuss treaty rights, and the relationship of the Canadian state to its indigenous peoples. She is currently living in a tee-pee on Victoria Island, in the Ottawa River, just a kilometre from the Parliament buildings. Harper has rejected calls to meet with Spence.

The demands of aboriginal peoples for decent housing, for respect of treaties, for the resolution of outstanding land claims, against tar sands pipelines, to win economic development beneficial to their communities, and to establish self-government are entirely just.

The task of the left and the workers’ movement, including labour unions and the NDP, is to promote and mobilize support for Idle No More, which has dramatized the cause of aboriginal peoples from coast to coast to coast.

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Socialist Action / Ligue pour l'Action socialiste is an organization of revolutionary socialists across the Canadian state, active in the labour movement, social justice, international solidarity, feminist and environmental campaigns.